Kaye Z.

Most acquisition research produces long lists of plausible names. That is not what I do. I find businesses that fit a specific brief, filter them down to a high-conviction shortlist, and write up the reasoning behind every pick and every pass. The written analysis is what clients act on. My job is judgment, not volume. I spent the last few years doing this work from the inside. At IntVentures, I built the deal-sourcing research department from scratch during the pandemic, covering the process, the qualification framework, and the team. We ran multiple client mandates at the same time, and the work contributed to closed acquisitions and signed LOIs. At Forum Media Group, I built their acquisition target database from the ground up, over 1,000 researched records across fragmented markets. I now offer this as a freelance service. The work is the same regardless of who I am working with: take a brief, build a target pool from primary sources, filter to the companies worth pursuing, verify the decision-maker contacts, and track the pipeline through to first outreach. I source from business registries, trade associations, industry directories, LinkedIn, and public filings rather than paid databases. That means the targets I find are not the same ones everyone else with a Pitchbook subscription is already approaching. On tools: I use Airtable for pipeline tracking and have built AI-assisted enrichment workflows that handle the data gathering layer so my time goes into qualification analysis and written reasoning. I am comfortable working independently and managing work across multiple active projects with minimal supervision. I work with M&A advisory firms, investment banks, private equity firms, holding companies, and acquisitive operators. If you are running an active buy-side mandate or building an acquisition pipeline and need a researcher who brings both the sourcing and the judgment, send me a message.